Open source software worth up to £43bn to UK economy, report

Open source usage continues to grow at 28.6 per cent year-on-year finds OpenUK research

A report by OpenUK estimates the total value of open source software to the UK Exchequer to be between £29.5 billion £43.2 billion, ahead of all other countries in Europe.

The State of Open Report for 2021 published by OpenUK, a charity dedicated to supporting open-source technologies in the UK, finds that the UK has gone from being an open source laggard a few years ago to the leading country in Europe.

"In 2005...the UK was quite behind in its usage of open source solutions. So back then most of the companies that I was trying to work with were mainly in France, Germany, Scandinavia, to some extent, and the UK was a long way behind, then something changed, I'd say between 2010 and 2015. Things turned around very quickly and I'd say the UK became almost a world leader in open source software," said Matt Barker, president & co-founder of Kubernetes professional services company Jetstack.

Rob Knight, CTO enterprise cloud products at SUSE, said the tipping point may have been the "shining example" of active adoption of Government Digital Services' (GDS) active preference for open source technologies, a point with which researcher and co-creator of business innovation planning tool Wardley Maps, Simon Wardley, agreed.

"Back around 2009-10, I wrote something called the Better for Less paper with Liam Maxwell, Mark Thompson and others, for Francis Maude, the Cabinet Minister. That helped create something called 'Spend Control in UK Government' and also supported the formation of GDS. Open source software and open standards were a big part of that," Wardley writes.

Open source usage continues to grow at 28.6 per cent year-on-year. The top three drivers for open source adoption in the UK are cloud, customers requesting open source in a way they did not a few years ago and developer demand - software developers and engineers overwhelmingly prefer the open source mix and match model.

The report features case studies from Lloyds and Barclays banks which emphasise the importance of community development and collaboration at the core of the open source model for both security and speed to market for innovations.

However, it notes, there are still barriers to adoption of open source at scale, with many large organisations still having policies concerning security, risk and compliance that can preclude some open source options.

Such hurdles may be overcome by initiatives such as the Linux Foundation's Open Chain which aims to build trust in by making open source licence compliance simpler and more consistent, the report suggests.

Amanda Brock, CEO of OpenUK said: "The world of open technology represents a massive opportunity to collaborate with others, develop new approaches to solving problems and improve digital services that we all now rely on every day.

"This report provides an overview of the economic impact that open source has for the UK using existing methodologies and figures. The UK was the biggest contributor to open source in the EU, ahead of Germany and France, so it's not terribly surprising to see our scale post-Brexit. "